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Friday, November 8, 2013

In The Dark - Day 4.75

Maybe there is some light at the end of the tunnel. DEM is reporting the following:

CenturyLink is reporting a restoration of limited land line long distance service as of 7:45pm on 11/8. This restoration is result of a temporary fix, and bandwidth is limited. Many calls may still have a hard time going through. Be patient, and try again if you are unable to connect.

Now would probably be a good time to hold off on any non-essential calls until initial rush passes.

We would fully expect there to be occasional set backs and technical complications in days to come. Hopefully overall trend is towards improved capability.

Thanks to everyone who has worked so hard on repair efforts, and most of all: thanks to all for community's patience and cooperative spirit. As always, a pleasure to witness, despite the struggles.

We've tried it, and it works (for now). We'd appreciate hearing if it is working elsewhere. Can you call the mainland? Do you have internet?

At 10:00pm I tried the internet and was getting a full 10Mbps download from DSL. Apparently the additional OPALCO microwave link was put into operation. At 1:37am, I'm still getting full speed up and down! Kudos to the crews from OPALCO pitching in! This has internet working two days ahead of previous estimates.

I live near Cattle Point on SJI and have struggled with very slow internet speeds for some time. Am told the problem is "bandwidth exhaustion" due to old phone lines that Century Link does not plan to replace in our neck of the woods. Now we have this outage and thentemporary fix with the assist of Opalco, and I am perplexed. If Opalco can provide internet when Century Link cannot, why can't I just swich to Opalco and be done with the lousey Century Link service? My current, apparently temporary internet connection seems, by the way, much faster than before with Century Link. Can anyone explain the ins and outs of this? Sure would like to know. Thanks.

I also live at Cattle Point and have the same issues with bandwidth exhaustion. Yes, the "fix" is working great, and I am at a loss to understand how temporary service is better than our regular service..I know that OPALCO had no luck selling the idea of an island based internet service before, any chance of it being revived after this fiasco? Also, does anyone here have experience with satellite based ISP's?

@ 10:10 a We, live near West Sound and have struggled with very slow internet speeds for some time. Am told the problem is "bandwidth exhaustion" due to old phone lines that Century Link does not plan to replace in our neck of the woods. Now we have this outage and then temporary fix with the assist of Opalco, and I am perplexed. If Opalco can provide internet when Century Link cannot, why can't I just switch to Opalco and be done with the lousy Century Link service? My current, apparently temporary internet connection seems, by the way, much faster than before with Century Link. Can anyone explain the ins and outs of this? WE WOULD SURE like to know, too. Thanks.

The problem is the classic "last mile problem" in rural areas. The CenturyLinksystem is based on what is called ADSL, or Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. From your house to the internet goes like this. Your DSL modem in your house connects over a pair of phone lines to a box, called a DSLAM, anywhere from 1,000 to 18,000 feet away. Up to about 200 customers connect to a single DSLAM. The DSLAM is connected by either 4 DS1 lines (6Mbps aggregate speed), or some are connected by optical fiber (about 1Gbps aggregate throughput). There are about 50 of these DSLAM boxes in the county, connecting to CO buildings (Central office) on San Juan, Lopez, and Orcas.The CO buildings are in turn connected to the CL's fiber backbone, which runs off off Lopez over to Anacortes, and eventually down to CL facilities in gig Harbor. To replace your home internet connection from the copper wire based DSL with optical fiber, requires an optical fiber be run from your house to the backbone, in one of several ways. To hook up all the residences in San Juan County, and all the business would require approximately 1,100 miles of optical fiber, and a number of passive and active electronics housings. Other communities which took BTOP money during the 2009 stimulus funding and built fiber optic systems of similar size spent about $70 to $80 million to fiber up their communities. The technology is no mystery. Figuring out how to pay for the capital costs is!

This is what OPALCO did, quoted off their website. As to the vastly superior quality of Internet service, from West Sound to Cattle Point, there is a reason ...

"OPALCO’s data communications system is now carrying the phone and data traffic for San Juan Island, and providing 911 and phone solutions for the rest of San Juan County until CenturyLink can repair or replace their failed submarine cable.

OPALCO has a robust data communications system in place to serve our electric distribution system, which includes redundancy for emergency back-up. We were able to quickly redirect CenturyLink’s San Juan Island traffic to a redundant link in our system, committing the staff, expertise and infrastructure resources necessary to help our fellow utility and get basic service to our membership in the interim. We are utilizing our back-up capacity (redundancy) on our co-op fiber and microwave radio links to route traffic between the islands and to the mainland."